This perennial question resurfaced recently in a thoughtful blog post by Andreas Neumann, Chief Architect of Cask, called What is Hadoop, anyway?. Ultimately, after a careful deconstruction of the terms in the question, Andreas concludes with

“Does it really matter to agree on the answer to that question? In the end, everybody who builds an application or solution on Hadoop must pick the technologies that are right for the use case.”

We’ve agreed from the beginning – that is the only answer that really matters. Still, the question continues to come up for end users of the stack and for vendors like Cask (it helps them think about what to support in their application development offering Cask Data App Platform (CDAP).

Analysts too: I’ve discussed it several times, including a post a year ago called What Is Hadoop….Now? tracking the path from 6 commonly supported projects in 2012 to 15 in June 2014, across a set of distributors that included Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and IBM. “Support” here means you pay for subscription that explicitly includes the named project.

In the first post in this series , I looked at the size of revenue streams for RDBMS software and maintenance/support and noted that they amount to $33B, pointing out that pure play Hadoop vendors had a high hill to climb. (I didn’t say so specifically, but in 2014, Gartner estimates that the three leading vendors generated less than $150M.)

In this post, Nick and I turn from Procurement to Plans and examine the buying intentions uncovered in Gartner surveys.

I have the privilege of working for the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, covering information management with a strong focus for the past few years on an emerging software stack called Hadoop. In the early part of 2015, that particular technology is moving from early adopter status to early majority in its marketplace adoption. The discussions and published work around it have been exciting and controversial, so in this post (and a couple to follow) I describe three interlocking research perspectives on Hadoop: procurement (counting real money actually spent); plans (surveys of intentions to invest) and positioning (subjective interpretations of what the first two mean.)

Since Nick Heudecker and I began our quarterly Hadoop webinars, we have asked our audiences what they expected to do about SQL several times, first in January 2014. With 164 respondents in that survey, 32% said “we’ll use what our existing BI tool provider gives us,” reflecting the fact that most adopters seem not to want to concern themselves overmuch with the details.

It’s Strata week here in San Jose, and with that comes a flood of new announcements on products, partners and funding. Today’s big announcement came in the form of the Open Data Platform (ODP). A number of companies have signed on, but in short, it’s got some Hadoopers, some service providers and systems integrators, as well as some analytics apps vendors.

Gartner’s quarterly Hadoop webinar in February 2015 showed that adoption of Hadoop is not rising quite as dramatically as some might believe. It’s flat compared to Q42014. Of nearly 1200 attendees, 465 shared their thinking with us via the usual polling, and the Deployed percentage was the same. Not that surprising for only 3 months between polls. And Q1 is not a big month for most software, especially a category that is at best generating a few hundred million dollars in revenues.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

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I am a Gartner analyst, covering information management with a strong focus these days on big data and NoSQL-related issues. I'll continue to post here, subject to the guidelines there, as well as in my Gartner blog. Posts here will link there.